Zothique, the Dying Earth, and Yog

 Last week I talked about the Dying Earth. Since this is last Monday before I get back to my Mirror Mondays, I do want to hold up another mirror, even if it is at an oblique angle.

So I find myself thinking of Yog again. More to the point, the Wasted Lands of Yog. Using the Wasted Lands RPG.

In a way, Yog is my own take on the Dying Earth setting, but I am not drawing from a single well. I have no desire for Yog to be just another Dying Earth or some other swords-and-sorcery affair with a red sun hanging over it all. Those are fun, of course, but we have a lot of games for that.

I want to convey to Yog an age that is almost impossible to put into words. The people who make their home now are walking atop entire civilizations that have come and gone. You will find kingdoms built on the ruins of older ones, by builders who could not have told you who put those ruins in place. The magic is as old as it is perilous, and one gets the impression it was better known to those who perished millennia ago than to the ones making use of it today.

History here does not run in a straight line; it is a matter of layers. Some of those layers get turned over, others have a way of waking up. I would say that is Vance’s influence.

But The Dying Earth is not what Yog is. Not exactly, anyway. 

Look at the gaming DNA, and you will also see plenty of Hyperborea. Jeffrey Talanian has put together an RPG that is part old-school D&D, part weird science-fantasy, and part swords & sorcery. He takes his cues from Howard, Lovecraft, and above all Clark Ashton Smith, yet he never loses sight of the fact that it has to function as a game. That is something I value.

Yog can have its share of dying-world philosophy, but at the end of the day I need my characters to be out there breaking down doors, sifting through ruins for ancient magic and the like, or putting an end to monsters. They will uncover things best left in the ground. Hyperborea allows for that sort of thing, with its mix of horror and the odd bit of impossible science.

Then you have Zothique.

For the mood of Yog, Clark Ashton Smith’s work is perhaps the most significant. I have talked a lot about Zothique in the past. It is the final continent of an Earth in the far future. The lands we know have been under the sea for eons while others have made their appearance and sunk again in the vastness of time. The sun is old, the world is in its last age, and much of history and science is a memory. Magic is back.

Smith was at it in the 1930s, well before Vance put pen to paper for The Dying Earth in 1950. And if Vance can be dangerous, Zothique is consumed by death.

You will find necromancers everywhere. It is not confined to the fellow in black robes in the tower on the edge of town. Sorcerers are raising kingdoms from corpses, lovers won’t stay in their graves, and tombs hold things with ambitions of their own. One could be in a city and feel as though it were a monument to a civilization that has already had its funeral.

In tales like "The Empire of the Necromancers" or "The Charnel God" (two of my favorites), death is not an interruption. It is the landscape. In some places, you might not be able to tell where life leaves off and death takes over.

That is very much how I see Yog. In a sense, Zothique is as decadent as I would have it be for Yog. You will find your share of kings and princes, merchants and priests, sorcerers and torturers, not to mention thieves and wanderers. Yet one gets the impression that very few are concerned with making tomorrow any better.

Then again, why put in the effort? There is little tomorrow to be had.

Kingdoms may come and go, but no one has much faith that they will endure. Religions make their way, though their deities are likely just old ghosts from a bygone era. And while cities hold on to life, the deserts are there to swallow them up, kingdom by kingdom. It all has a temporary quality about it, even civilization itself. That is what I am after on Yog.

Vance provides the ancient world, the oddity of magic and knowledge long since put aside, and the absurdity of folk carrying on with their small-time schemes under a waning sun. Hyperborea offers the gameable swords & sorcery structure; on its map a barbarian or a witch can rub shoulders with a weird monster or some relic of ancient tech, and no one needs to make an issue of it.

But from Zothique, I take the death.

Not in the sense of a high body count, but as entropy. The end of empires and languages and gods. A city left to rot. A tradition of magic is vanishing because the last adept who knew it is gone and taught no one. Whole ways of seeing the world are being buried in the sand.

I want to put that into Yog. I want ruins whose names are no one’s recollection. Gods known only by what was chiseled into a tomb. Spells so old that the question of whether their maker was human is a matter of debate. Dead civilizations layered on top of other dead ones. The people of Yog don’t live amid the detritus of a single past, but of many. That makes a difference.

It goes some way to explaining the necromancy on Yog. The living are a minority compared to the dead, and the weight of those ages is upon us. To a necromancer, it is less a transgression than tapping into the world’s greatest resource: its history.

There are some ways in which I part company with both Vance and Smith.

As mentioned previously, I am also taking influence from other sources. Raven, Swordsmistress of Chaos is not great, but fun. I did my playtesting of Wasted Lands using Raven, and it was a lot of fun. The world fits. I am also mining Gor. Gor is not great, nor is it fun. BUT it does give me some great antagonists to fight against. Something that Vance and Smith do not really do. 

There are things about Gor that are useful to me.

The city-states. The strange cultures. The decadent courts. The merchants, warriors, priests, assassins, and thieves. A world that can feel ancient and brutal even when remnants of advanced technology are hiding behind the curtains. And, of course, the Priest-Kings.

I am even using that name on Yog, though my Priest-Kings are not Norman's alien rulers. Mine are human. Painfully, disappointingly human.  They rule the city-states of Yog through religion, tradition, violence, and fear.

And then there is slavery. You can't really talk about Gor without talking about slavery, particularly the sexual slavery of women. It is not some incidental bit of background decoration in those books. It becomes fundamental to Norman's vision of the world and, eventually, to the philosophy he is trying to sell.

That is where Yog takes a very different road. I don't want to recreate Gor, vis-à-vis a Dying Earth lens. 

I want to burn Gor to the fucking ground. 

Or, more to the point, I want the player characters to be able to do it. 

I want that fantasy woman on the cover of the sleazy 70s and 80s paperback to be the one saying to the oppressors, "Everything dies. But you are dying first."

Yog is a world at the end of things, to be sure. But I don’t see everyone there as ready to make peace with it. Let the sun die if it must. Let the empire become another stratum for someone to walk on. Those still drawing breath now are going to put up a fight for it. They will face down monsters and slavers and Priest-Kings and any king or sorcerer who thinks a dying world is a license to ruin the rest of your days. 

And quite a few of the people doing the fighting are going to be witches.

Perhaps that is the line between the two. The Dying Earth says "we are all going to die." Yog wants to know what you intend to do about it first.

Fantasy Fridays: The Dying Earth

 Today marks the 110th anniversary of Jack Vance's birth. Back in May, I covered his Dying Earth books for my Witches of Appendix N. Today I want to look at the RPGs of the Dying Earth. There are essentially two published ones, Pelgrane Press' and Goodman Games for Dungeon Crawl Classics. I will consider both today.

Games at The End of the World

I have been spending quite a lot of time lately thinking about dying worlds.

Not post-apocalyptic worlds necessarily. That is something different. I mean worlds that are simply old. Very old. Ancient. Worlds where civilizations have risen, fallen, been forgotten, and had new civilizations built on top of their ruins. And those have fallen and been forgotten as well. Worlds where the sun itself is old, and everyone knows, at least somewhere in the back of their minds, that eventually it is going to go out.

Such is the world of Jack Vance's The Dying Earth.

Vance began the series with The Dying Earth in 1950, followed by The Eyes of the Overworld, Cugel's Saga, and Rhialto the Marvellous. These stories helped give a name to the entire "Dying Earth" genre, although Clark Ashton Smith had already been exploring similar territory with his tales of Zothique in the pages of Weird Tales. (I'll get back to this...)

For gamers, though, Vance is particularly important because his fingerprints are all over Dungeons & Dragons.

The most obvious is magic.

The classic D&D Magic-User studies spells, holds a limited number of them in memory, casts one, and then loses it from memory. That system comes directly from Vance. Gary Gygax openly acknowledged the influence, and The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld appeared in the famous Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide. Even things such as the Prismatic Spray and Ioun Stones have Vancian ancestors.

But reducing Vance's influence to "Vancian magic" misses a lot.

The Dying Earth is full of dangerous ruins, forgotten technologies that might as well be magic, bizarre monsters, petty magicians, decadent city-states, amoral adventurers, strange customs, ancient artifacts, and people willing to undertake extraordinarily dangerous journeys because someone told them there might be something valuable at the other end.

Sound familiar? It should. 

Plus, there is the feeling of overwhelming dread that the sun could go out tomorrow or next week or in a thousand or a million years. The people, though, are not letting that stop them. Party like it is 1,999,999,999. 

That mixture of wonder, decadence, fatalism, absurdity, and danger makes the Dying Earth a fantastic place for gaming. It also makes it surprisingly difficult to get right.

There are currently two major licensed attempts to bring Vance's world directly to the gaming table. One comes from Pelgrane Press. The other comes from Goodman Games.  Both have their merits and take remarkably different approaches.

And I think both approaches tell us something useful about the Dying Earth.

Pelgrane Press - The Dying Earth

When Pelgrane Press put out The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game in 2001, they were putting the first officially sanctioned version of Vance’s world into print. And this one is nearly as legendary as the stories it is based on. Robin D. Laws was the chief designer on the 192-page core book, with John Snead and Peter Freeman.

Laws was quick to see that a straightforward adaptation of D&D would not do for his game. There is no denying the debt D&D has to Vance, but for all that, a D&D character does not act like one of Vance’s creations. That was the problem Laws intended to put right.

Combat is there, of course, but so are Persuade and Rebuff, and they are just as vital. An argument is made into a mechanical contest; with the right style of persuasion or resistance, you can be as effective at talking an opponent into some folly as you would be with a sword. It has the right feel.

The mechanics are built around a d6 and point-rated abilities, which can be spent to tip the odds, giving the narrative play a light touch of resource management. One should not confuse this with GUMSHOE, even if Pelgrane has become synonymous with that system in later years. The Dying Earth RPG has its own rules and predates GUMSHOE entirely.

Then there is the matter of power levels, perhaps the most interesting thing about the design. A campaign is broken down into three tiers. You have the Cugel level, where you are an adventurer or a rogue, and survival is as much about a well-told lie as it is about your fighting prowess. Move up to Turjan, and the characters are magicians of note, delving into ancient places and wielding serious spells. At the Rhialto level, you are dealing with the likes of the sandestins and commanding extraordinary power.

It is a fine way to handle the source material. Cugel and Rhialto may share a world, but they are hardly of the same genre or power level, and Pelgrane makes no pretense that one evolves into the other by the ordinary process of advancement. They are simply different ways to play.

Pelgrane has also been thorough in their treatment of Vance’s world, from the oddities of Kaiin to lost civilizations and the more eccentric corners of the Dying Earth. They have backed the game with a good number of supplements and The Excellent Prismatic Spray magazine over the years.

There is an obvious weakness to it all, however. This is a game keen on staying true to Vancian behavior, and the player has to come to terms with that. The long list of abilities is a telltale sign of the late 90s/early 2000s design school, and even some adherents of the game wish it were shorter (the Revivification Folio has since put some order to the rules).

But the basic aim is met. If the players start quibbling over armor class and marching order when a monster turns up, they are missing the point. But when one player declares that character must go in first by virtue of his education, and the player is hard put to make the case for another’s superior qualifications, then we are on to something.

Pelgrane is not after D&D’s take on Vance. They are after Vance himself. There is a difference. Understanding that is the key to playing this game.

Dungeon Crawl Classics - Dying Earth

Then there is Goodman Games, which takes almost the opposite approach.

With Dungeon Crawl Classics Dying Earth, you are not put to the task of learning some new game built for the express purpose of emulating Vance or a Vancian world. The question posed here is far more intriguing: what if we were to take Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), with its Appendix N pedigree, and shove it headlong into one of its own source materials?

As it happens, quite a bit comes of it, and the results are quite fun.

The 2023 release from Goodman is a substantial boxed set for the DCC RPG. You will find a 64-page Player’s Libram, the 104-page Primer of Practical Magic, a bestiary, and other resources in the set. It is an expansion and a setting, not a stand-in for the core game; the regular rules are still required.

Four new classes make up the bulk of the mechanical changes: the Magician, Wayfarer, Witch, and Vat-Thing. You already know this has my attention.

Take the Wayfarer. He is your Cugel type, a rogue and opportunist, a confidence man who is as much a survivor as a traveler. Since Luck is already a defining feature of DCC, Goodman has made much of it. A Wayfarer’s Luck can be wonderfully volatile, and the class has the rhetorical tools for the verbal manipulation a Vancian scoundrel requires. In a way it is a clever solution to the problem Pelgrane noted, that Cugel is apt to talk someone else into having his problems for him. Only here it is done in DCC fashion.

The Magician is another matter. DCC wizards have always been something of a risk; spell checks are unpredictable and dabbling in the supernatural leaves its mark. The Dying Earth version of the class goes further. The designers have made for an exceptional offensive caster where spells are not so much a curriculum as fragments of lost knowledge handed down by some eccentric sorcerer. Very Vancian.

Then you have the Witch and the Vat-Thing, which move things away from standard DCC fantasy. The latter, in particular, is well suited to a world where magicians will putter about making life in vats with little more than a vague notion of what they are at. It underlines the fine line between magic, old science, and monstrosity.

New rules, patrons, and creatures are in order, as well as grudge tokens, which I like. There are rules for grudges because this is Jack Vance. The petty feuds and betrayals get some mechanical heft. And with fresh treatments of rhetoric and Luck, the DCC mechanics acquire a Dying Earth edge.

You could make a case for criticism. After all, it is still DCC.

Someone on the RPG subreddit put it well: with Pelgrane, you have the Cugel stories where everyone is out to swindle each other, whereas DCC is more like the early Dying Earth where the world wants to eat or deceive you. Another felt Goodman was simply forcing the setting into DCC rather than making a system for Vance. That is certainly the mission statement of the original Dying Earth RPG.

I would say both are fair points. But I don’t see the second as a flaw. DCC is already in the neighborhood with its desperate tomb robbers, its inexplicable artifacts, and its wizards playing with forces they do not comprehend. There is no need to force the fit. DCC was already halfway there on its own. It is largely one of tone and personal choices.  

Pelgrane has you playing Vancian characters. Goodman provides the Vancian adventure. They are not the same, but they are close enough that I could see myself drawing on either for a campaign.

In fact, the best Dying Earth experience likely lies somewhere where these two games intersect. Either is fine on its own, really, but together they provide a truer picture.

No. I am not going to attempt conversion notes. 

The Ash Witch

Since I first read Clark Ashton Smith's "Zothique," I have had this image of a witch walking out of the desert where no one should have survived. She has a staff with a skull on top and covered in ash. I'll also admit the idea of her walking out of the desert and into a city-state was largely influenced by Black Sabbath's "The Wizard."

Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" has done nothing to dissuade me from this vision.

Eventually, the Ash Witch became someone important in my Yog setting, even if just as a tale or legend, but that legend starts somewhere. So here she is, for the DCC Dying Earth (fits her the best).

This is very much a "Dying Earth" version of this character; I even have The Murthe, the Sorceress Llorio, as her Patron. 

Larina, the Ash Witch

Larina Eschata, the Ash Witch
10th-level Neutral Witch
Pact Entity: The Murthe, Llorio the Sorceress
Occupation: Scholar of forgotten religions
Alignment: Neutral

Str 10 (+0)
Agi 15 (+1)
Sta 14 (+1)
Per 18 (+3)
Int 17 (+2)
Luck 16 (+2)

HP: 38
AC: 13

Init: +1
Speed: 30'
Attack: +5
Action Dice: 1d20 + 1d20
Crit: 1d20/II

Saves: Fort +4, Ref +7, Will +7

Spell Check: +13
Maximum Spell Level: 5

Ritual Weapon: Dagger
Birth Augur: Survived beneath the Dying Sun.
Birth Gift: Second Sight.
Known Squalms: 14.
Demonic Taint: 3

Starting Animus: Syncretic Heretic

Larina has publicly denied the divine authority of the Priest-Kings and incorporated forbidden rites, dead gods, and the teachings of Llorio the Murthe into her witchcraft. Priests, inquisitors, and agents of the Priest-Kings regard her as a particularly dangerous heretic.

Ensqualm: Curse

First level: Charm person*, comprehend languages, detect magic, demon summoning, magic missile, ropework, sleep, ward portal.
Second level: Detect invisible, ESP*, forget*, invisibility, levitate, scorching ray.
Third level: Consult spirit, dispel magic, fireball, paralysis*, write magic.
Fourth level: Control fire, polymorph, wizard sense.
Fifth level: Magic bulwark.

* The Murthe's Favor

Transfer Vitality: d20 + Personality modifier + class level check.

The Witches of Appendix N: H.P. Lovecraft

One of the old masters of the Dungeons & Dragons experience, and indeed of many role-playing games, is H. P. Lovecraft. Since tomorrow would have been his 136th birthday, it seems fitting to examine his contribution to the Witches of Appendix N.

I could spend an entire series discussing his influence on D&D, AD&D, and Call of Cthulhu. I could spend another series on his influence on modern horror. Others have done that work, and done it well.

Instead, I want to narrow the focus. Not how Lovecraft influenced Gary Gygax when co-writing Dungeons & Dragons with Dave Arneson, nor how he influenced later AD&D design. I want to look specifically at the witches in his fiction. Witches that are recognizable to readers of this blog.

The Big Three

When it comes to witches, there are three stories that stand out more than the others: Dreams of the Witch House, The Dunwich Horror, and The Thing on the Doorstep. 

Keziah Mason

The Dreams in the Witch House features Keziah Mason, the ur-witch of the Mythos.

She is said to have lived in Salem in 1692 and to have been arrested during the witch trials. That alone gives her a witch pedigree that no other Lovecraft character quite matches. Her former home is literally known as “The Witch House.”

But Keziah is not merely a colonial sorceress. She is a mathematician of the forbidden and the occult.

Her witchcraft blends:

• Ritual magic
• Non-Euclidean geometry
• Pacts with beings beyond human comprehension
• Dimensional travel

She has a familiar, the rat-thing Brown Jenkin, which acts as a proper familiar should: as an intermediary, a spy, and a bringer of harm.

The aspect of Keziah that makes her truly Lovecraftian is her intellectual approach to magic. She gets her power not from the earth, the herbs, the spirits, but from her understanding of the world in terms of angles, of solving equations, of navigating hyperspace through mathematics.

You could argue quite readily that the character of Keziah Mason is much closer to the D&D warlock than the witch. She is not the village's wise woman. She is the academic heretic, the one who has turned her back on the academic world. And it is here that the concept of the warlock in D&D starts to come together: the pact-maker, the wielder of forbidden knowledge, the one who trades safety for power.

I have also used her as the source of the equations used to power starships in my BlackStar setting. 

Lavinia Whateley and the Whateley Clan

The next one is The Dunwich Horror.  Lavinia Whateley and the Whateleys are basically archetypical witch family. The Mayfair family from Anne Rice is basically from the same mold.

Lavinia is described as ugly, albino, and strange-looking. She is isolated in the rural area of Dunwich, Massachusetts, and is raised by her grandfather, Old Whateley, who teaches her arcane formulae from forbidden books.

She is a participant in a ritual summoning and has a child with Yog-Sothoth.

This is hereditary or family witchcraft.

Unlike Keziah, Lavinia does not seem to be driven by a thirst for knowledge, merely part of a family tradition. The Whateleys seem to be part of an occult dynasty, a decadent New England family that still practices pre-Christian and cosmic rituals.

Lavinia is a bit of a mysterious figure; is she a willing participant or a victim? She is only described in external terms, observed, and spoken about.

This is the archetype for the rural cult witch in D&D: the isolated valley, the hidden grimoires, the crossbreeding with the outer forces, and the idea that witchcraft is not a class choice, merely a blood inheritance. It might even be related to the D&D Sorcerer, rather than the standard Draconic bloodline that is standard in the 3rd edition era; it is the root of the Aberation bloodlines in later editions.

Asenath Waite 

She is presented as attractive, though marked by unnerving eyes. She is the daughter of Ephraim Waite, an Innsmouth occultist. Her mother was a Deep One.

Asenath’s witchcraft is intimate. She practices:

• Body-swapping
• Identity erasure
• Psychological domination

Where Keziah works through geometry and Lavinia through lineage, Asenath works through possession.

She is a domestic witch in the most terrifying sense. She marries. She enters a home. She infiltrates identity itself. 

And unlike Lavinia, Asenath is not passive. She is willful. She drives the action. She pursues control.

Lovecraft and Witches

We know from his letters that Lovecraft had a dim view of feminism. I am not prepared to say he was misogynistic at all, but rather, he seemed not to think about women very much. The women in his tales were either mothers or had occult ties.  

Keziah Mason and Lavinia Whateley are examples of women who engage in forbidden knowledge, defy social norms, and exist outside ordinary domestic life. While this makes them good witch characters, it does not put either into particularly good light. There are no witch protagonists in Lovecraft tales because there are no women protagonists. Some of this is due to the time, and some to Lovecraft's very conservative social outlook. None of this is really in dispute, but it does color how I want to approach his witches. 

True, none of the characters above are "misunderstood," but they could be more nuanced. Is Lavinia a victim of her weird-ass family? Is Keziah a victim of her own genius? Is Asenath a...no Asenath is pretty much as she is written. 

The Witch as Seeker of Power

There is a recurring pattern here.

Lovecraft’s witches access knowledge denied to them by conventional institutions. They do not sit in classes at Miskatonic University. They might haunt the library, but they are never part of the faculty or student body.

• They make pacts.
• They inherit grimoires.
• They calculate angles that warp reality.

It supports a powerful interpretation: witches are those who seek access to forbidden systems of knowledge when barred from official ones.

And in Lovecraft’s universe, knowledge itself corrupts.

Given how many of his male scholars meet equally terrible ends, perhaps the lesson is not that women should not seek knowledge, but that no one should.

Tales of Jackson, IL: Val and Ami

 I have not done any NPC profiles in a long time. I wanted to do this because at EGG CON I had a player play Val, and he did such a great job bringing my "dumb jock" to life. I just had to revisit him. 

Ok, calling Valentino "Val" Michele Moreno a dumb jock in not fair. He is not the smartest guy in the room, but he has a lot of things going for him besides being on the football and baseball teams. I also want to talk about his other best friend Ami. It takes Val a bit, but he realizes that Ami is in love with him. 

Both Val and Ami are here for the "High School Jock" stereotypes, and honestly, if this were a horror movie, they would be among the first to die. But this is a game, and they both are really good kids and a lot of fun, so far they have lived and even taken some serious hits. Well...every hit is serious in this game.

Valentino "Val" Michele Moreno

Val has been Andy Thompson's best friend since 1974, when Val brought a Nerf football to preschool, and they played with it all recess. Val's family never had the money the Thompsons did, but Andy LOVED staying with Val because of his huge family. It is Val and his four younger sisters. Val was almost sent to St. Michael's Catholic School, but he convinced his parents that his chances at a football or baseball scholarship would be better at Jackson Public High School. He was right, of course. 

At the start of the game, Val is dating Stephanie Vale. Naturally, the captain of the football team is dating the head cheerleader. They break up when Stephanie discovers all the supernatural dealings in town. Plus, Stephanie can see that Ami is the one who loves Val. 

Val is a Divine Warrior, from the NIGHT SHIFT: Night Companion. He was originally just going to be a survivor, but something in him awakened when the Bell rang in Jackson. He was already a fairly devout Catholic boy with very strong opinions. Also, the idea of a monster preying on girls in his town was deeply offensive to him. Yes, this is me being political. So when he discovered that his ex-girlfriend and her friends were fighting monsters at night, Val did what Val always does; he grabbed a baseball bat and went to help, whether they wanted him to or not. Turns out that Val's moral compass is so true his bat actually damages supernautral creatures.

Valentino "Val" Michele Moreno
2nd-level Divine Warrior, Human

Background: Jock

Base Abilities

Strength: 16 (+2) A
Agility: 17 (+2) n
Toughness: 15 (+1) n
Intelligence: 11 (+0) 
Wits: 12 (+0) 
Persona: 14 (+1) 

Vit: 10 (2d6)
DV: 8
Fate Points: 1d6

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +2/+1/+0
Attack bonus (base): +2
Melee bonus: +4  Ranged bonus: +2

Saves: +1 to Wits and Persona-based saves, +1 to Toughness-based (Jock)

Languages: English
Skills: 

Divine Warrior Abilities
Danger Sense 1 (1d8), Heal injury 1d6 ("walk it off"), Supernatural Attack +1

Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
Height: 6'1"
DOB: 1/12/1969

Archetype: The Jock
Quote: "It's not trash-talk if I am right."
Quirks: Is a lot more observant than he lets on.
Theme song: "Centerfield" by John Fogerty

His middle name "Michele" is a variant of "Michael," his patron Saint. St. Michael the patron saint of those who hunt demons. He wears a Saint Michael medallion, and Larina swears it glows when he is fighting. She is not a fan of Val, but knows he is good in a fight. She also knows that whatever makes his medallion glow doesn't particularly care for witches.

One day at school, Valentino was walking down the hall when someone shouted, "Hey Val!"  Both Valentino and Valerie Beaumont said "What?" at the same time, and both laughed. The next day, she said, "Hey Val!" to him, and he said, "Hey Val!" back. It became their thing until graduation and long after. The Assistant Principal, Glenn Daniels, wanted it stopped, but Valerie told him to pull the stick out of his ass. 

Spoilers: Val goes on to the U of I with Ami on that scholarship. He played ball for the minor-league Cardinals for a couple of years but injured his elbow. He ends up teaching at St. Michael's Catholic School and serving as its football coach. 

In 2019, Andy (head football coach at JPHS) and Val decided to do a charity game at the end of their seasons between JPHS and St. Mike's to raise money for local charities. They called the "Crosstown Classic," and it became a weekend-long celebration before the Thanksgiving break. 

Typically, the Hope Center, a place for women and children seeking assistance built by social worker Denise Carver, gets its funds. 

Ami Beth Reed

Ami Beth Reed is on the track team, the girls' basketball team, but most importantly (to her), the girls' softball team. Ami is tough, a little loud, and easy to spot. She stands nearly 6' tall and has short cropped black hair. She is attractive, but her rough exterior tends to intimidate most high school kids. She drives a beat-up '79 Chevy C/K truck that constantly blares Iron Maiden, Judas Priest, and the Scorpions.

Also, everyone thinks Ami is gay. Everyone is wrong. Despite her rough exterior, Ami doesn't really know how to talk to guys. That is, except for Val. Val and Ami have a natural chemistry that people find "odd."  Val was known as the guy who was dating Stephanie Vale, and now he hangs out with Ami all the time. Val tells people that Ami is a great workout partner; they go running every morning. Plus Val will proudly say, "Hey, I am maturing. I have a girl as a best friend."

Ami is hopelessly in love with Val.

Well...not hopeless. In an early playtest adventure, Ami gets hurt when a monster claws her stomach, leaving deep wounds. This established a few things. First, Ami has this cool scar on her side. Secondly, it solidified Candy as my go-to medic, but most of all, it awakened Val's inner Divine Warrior. Ami got hurt, and Val went psycho on the monster. 

Ami Reed
1st level Survivor, Human

Background: Jock

Base Abilities

Strength: 14 (+1)
Agility: 13 (+1) 
Toughness: 14 (+1) n
Intelligence: 13 (+1) 
Wits: 16 (+2) A
Persona: 15 (+4) n

Vit: 5 (1d4)
DV: 8
Fate Points: 1d6

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +2/+1/+0
Attack bonus (base): +0
Melee bonus: +0  Ranged bonus: +0

Languages: English
Skills: 

Saves: +3 to death saves, +1 to Toughness-based (Jock)

Survivor Abilities
Improved defense -1, Open Locks 20%, Bypass traps 15%, Sleight of hand 25%, Move silently 25%, Hide in shadows 25%, Climb 55%, Danger Sense 1-2 (1d6), Perception 40%, Sneak attack +4

Hair: Black
Eyes: Blue
Height: 6'0"
DOB: 2/14/1969

Archetype: The Tough Girl
Quote: Rolls shoulder and points with her bat, "Dibs on the big one."
Quirks: Likes to think she is invincible and takes the hits the "little witches" can't. There is truth in this, but she is not indestructible. 
Theme song: "Invincible" by Pat Benatar

 Ami is from the "bad side" of town on the northeast side. She is not a bad kid, quite the opposite, really, but she has had to learn how to hold herself. She has been in some fights, but has learned that intimidation often stops most fights before they start. Consequently, she always has one of her bats handy. 

In truth, Ami doesn't really care for basketball, but as the tallest girl in the school, she felt kind of obligated to join. She does, however, really enjoy softball and often teases Val that she can outhit him. They spend a lot of time together at the batting cages. Only much later in life will they agree that those nights were in fact dates.

Much like Val, supernatural monsters preying on the helpless offend her sensibilities of right and wrong. 

Spoilers: Ami and Val did get together at the Senior Prom. They then went to the U of I together. Where they stayed together (minus a dramatic "break" their junior year that was short-lived) the whole time. 

Ami got her degree in physical therapy and does weekend sports casts on the local radio station (minor in Radio and Television Media). 

Years later, as married couples, Andy and Rowan, along with Val and Ami, get together on Sunday to watch whatever game is on. Rowan asks questions about what is going on, often just to get a rise out of everyone. 

She had gotten so much grief for her height and jock appearance in high school that when Playboy came around U of I for one of their college girls specials, she submitted pictures. She made the issue representing the University of Illinois. Later, when she shows the issue to Denise and Candy, Candy is pissed off that they airbrushed out her scars. But otherwise, they are thrilled to be friends with a certified "Fucking Amazon Goddess." Val is also pretty thrilled with the issue as well. 

Real-world influence: I went to college with Jenny McCarthy. No, I did not know her well. Her younger sister, Joanne, was one of my students, though. Interestingly enough, that was two different universities on opposite ends of the state. 

Night Shift^® is a registered trademark of Elf Lair, LLC.

Tales of Jackson, IL: Jenny, Jenny Who Can I Turn To?

 Today is Jenny Everywhere Day!

I make no excuses for it. I love Jenny Everywhere. 

I love the character, I love the concept, and I love how and why she was created, and just all of it really. Today is the day we celebrate Jenny in all her multitudes. And we celebrate by contributing to her lore.

First and foremost, I must include her license. I don't do this because I have too, I do because it is also part of what I love about her.

"The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed."

I felt like it was also a great day to finally introduce Jenny, the Shifter, to NIGHT SHIFT. I mean, really. A multi-genre game system needs equally multi-genre NPCs. Jenny can be in every Night World, every Solar Frontier, and by both her own logic and the logic of the Dreaming Age, Jenny was found in the Wasted Lands.

Jenny in Jackson, IL

Jenny: "This town is so weird, and so much more dangerous than any of you know. Seriously, you should all move out, like, now. You are all absolutely bonkers for staying here. But I can’t help it. I love it here."

Larina: "That...is not very reassuring."

Of course, Jenny would end up here eventually. Her "eventually" and our "eventually" are not really the same thing at all, but that is fine. I imagine the characters see her reflection in the glass of Paula's Bookstore one day. She is waving at them, but they can't see her standing inside the store or behind them. She walks through the glass and stands out on the sidewalk. She knows the characters and some of their details, but they are also out of order. Some details are from the future; others may deal with other versions of the characters. So questions like "wow, when did you start wearing glasses?" to characters who have always worn glasses, and so on.

She will exclaim with much pride that today is her birthday and that she was born on this day in 2002. Or will be. Hard to keep timelines straight when you are a Shifter.

Here is how I am planning to use her. Jenny is not a fighter. She is not a harbinger. She is not a warning or even a cautionary tale. Jenny is just fun. Now that doesn't mean something weird isn't happening. But her appearance should feel like the first episode after Sweeps Week or a slightly silly Monster of the Week one. BUT she can be used to move the adventure forward or provide some clues.

For example. In Jackson, the "Big Bad" is the Hollow King. He is trying to absorb special items and then people to fill the emptiness, sorry, Emptiness, inside. His ultimate targets are Candy and Denise. Why? They are "mirror shards," and while they seem to be just two party girls, they actually have connections to all their alternate universe selves. Candy even says all the time, "I contain multitudes." She says it because she thinks it makes her sound cool and deep. But in reality? She could not be more correct. She and Denise have enough to make the Hollow King whole again. And that is bad. Not just "in bringing back a very powerful Necromancer" bad (where the most powerful witch right now is only 2nd level), but because two very sweet and mostly innocent girls would be dead.

Jenny: "Yeah, the data plan is great, but I have to wait 35 more years for decent 5G."

Jenny is like a shard as well. But Jenny is aware of all her "shards," and they are aware of her. The Hollow King could no more consume her than I could eat all of the food in Chicago right now. It would destroy him.  BUT Jenny knows the importance of Denise and Candy. She knows their other shards. 

Now...she might not know why they are important to what is going on in THIS Jackson right now. And she might not even know they are part of the larger seasonal arc; she just knows they are important.

Because of course they are.

Jenny Everywhere
The Shifter

4th level Sage, Human (mostly)

Background: Multiversal traveler. 

Base Abilities

Strength: 11 (+0)
Agility: 13 (+1) 
Toughness: 16 (+2) 
Intelligence: 17 (+2) A
Wits: 13 (+1) N
Persona: 16 (+2) N

Vit: 22 (1d6)
DV: 7 (leather jacket)
Fate Points: 1d6

Check Bonus (A/N/D): +3/+2/+0
Attack bonus (base): +0
Melee bonus: +0  Ranged bonus: +1

Languages: All
Skills: A little bit of everything

Saves: +3 to spells and magic-based saves

Sage Abilities
Survivor Skills, Mesmerize ("Fast Talk"), Lore, Languages, Spells

Survivor Skills
Open Locks: 25%
Bypass Traps: 20%
Sleight of Hand: 30%
Move Silently: 30%
Hide in Shadows: 20%

Read Languages: 20%

Spells*
First-level: Bless ("Motivation Speech"), Command
Second-level: Knock

*Note about spells: Jenny doesn't actually cast spells. Her 'magic' allows certain disruptions of the local reality. She can talk to give someone an emotional boost ("Bless") or get them to do something else ("Command"). She also has an affinity for locks...or more to the point, she has an affinity for getting into places she really shouldn't, and locked doors are not going to be an obstacle ("Knock"). 

Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
Height: 5'1"
Weight: 101 lbs

Archetype: The Shifter
Quote: "I’m not lost. I’m just taking the scenic route through reality."
Quirks: Travels the multiverse or "shifts" to different realities.
Theme song: She tells everyone it is "867-5309/Jenny" by Tommy Tutone, because she loves seeing people's reactions. (I have to admit I always think it is "Donna Everywhere" by Too Much Joy, but she doesn't fit the girl in the song at all.)

Heroic Touchstones
1st Level: Psychic Power: Tele-empathic link (to other selves) 
3rd Level: Aura Sense/Sight (Mirror Shard Awareness)

The Mirror Shard: Mirror Shard Awareness

Jenny Everywhere does not see the future. Not exactly. She sees versions.

She has made the acquaintance of people before they were born and after they were dead. She has been in worlds where they are famous and in ones where no one remembers them; worlds where they made every wrong move and, impossibly, where they got it right. Jenny does not always have the wherewithal to tell which version is from which reality or which of her memories will be of use. But she will remember a face, a name, and the particular shape a soul has when you run into it more than once.

Jenny calls it her sight. I call this Mirror Shard Awareness.

It is not mind-reading, nor is it prophecy. Call it a multiversal memory. When she comes across someone of consequence, she might well recognize another version of them. Some days this makes her helpful, some days funny, and on occasion it makes her exceedingly careful.

In the course of play, this awareness lets Jenny know things about a character that she ought not to. A nickname that has yet to be used. A scar this world has not put on him. A debt, a rescue, a funeral, or a betrayal that never took place here. Her asides will sound like jokes or mistakes, but there is nothing random about them.

Take Larina Nichols in Jackson. Jenny will notice the glasses first. Many Larinas don’t wear them, but the one in Jackson does. And the one for the Mage RPG does. Jenny puts two and two together: the ones with the glasses are usually the sort who have seen too much and found a way to live with it. The magic they see all the time is just too much.

Or when she calls Faye "Fey." The rest of the room won’t catch it, but Faye will. It will land wrong, or perhaps too right. Jenny isn’t mispronouncing Faye Thorne's name; she is recalling a version of her for whom the name was something older.

The immortal Valerie will get a smile and an inquiry as to where the ten dollars she owes her are, even though Valerie has no recollection of owing Jenny a thing.

"Not yet," Jenny will say, unbothered.

When she sees Candy and Denise are together, Jenny goes quiet. 

"Oh," she’ll say in a low voice. "There they are." She doesn't know why they are important, just that they are. 

That is the awareness at work. Jenny has known Jacksons without them. Jacksons where only one of the pair made it, or where they never met, and the town was all the colder for the absence of two ordinary, impossible girls. She knows their futures. The daughter Denise adopts. The Hope Center that Denise and Candy built/will build in the 2010s to help families in need. 

People's pasts and futures are in her head, but they do not always belong to this world. This is one of the reasons she can't be trusted as an oracle. She is telling the truth; the problem is you can never be sure which truth applies here. She isn't psychic (normally); she just has a lot of incomplete histories and futures.

Game Use

A scene may warrant a comment from Jenny about an important NPC or PC by way of Mirror Shard Awareness. Let the GM make of it what they will: a clue, a warning, an emotional complication, or a jest. It should hint at a possible truth without writing the character’s future for them.

Examples:

"Still here. Good. That matters."

"You wrote the song already? No? My mistake."

"Wait, the scar isn’t there yet? Good. You want to stay off the gym roof in November."

"You are so much harder to convince in this version."

The GM is free to decide if such remarks are true, partly true, true in another timeline or merely symbolic. Jenny is not lying. She is just carrying around too many maps.

Limit: Too Many Truths

Jenny has trouble separating one world’s truth from another. If the players put her on the spot for a straight answer on the future, the GM can rule one of three ways: it is true here, it is true in another world, or it is true only if the characters make it so. Jenny is aware of this and would rather be irritating than put words to a possibility and turn it into a cage.

Edited to Add: This past weekend, I ran a "Next Generation" game in Jackson to see if the setting works outside of the 1980s time frame. It does, but I like the 1980s vibe better. But it does give me a new idea for when I use Jenny later on.

Jenny: "Oh! And say hi to Taryn for me!
Larina: "Who is Taryn?"
Jenny: "Oh. Sorry. Spoilers. Say hi to her in 2012."

Special Limit: Larina's Mirror

You will not catch Jenny looking in Larina's mirror. Not safely. 

While she has passed through a train window, or a comic panel, even a particularly judgmental snow globe to cross universes, Larina’s mirror is different. It doesn’t just show you alternate worlds; it throws back too many shards of Larina Nichols at once: the Witch Queen, the librarian, the schoolgirl, the red-headed girl with the black fingernails and a notebook, the woman with blood on her hands, the psychic storm that still uses her name.

If forced to look, she must save vs. magic (or equivalent). Fail, and she is stunned for 1d6 rounds, unable to shift and unsure of which Jackson she is in. Succeed, and she still sees one impossible Larina with too much clarity and will have nothing more to do with it.

"Nope. Uhn-uh. Absolutely not. That is a Larina-shaped traffic accident across twelve dimensions."

And if she is feeling less flippant:

"That thing doesn’t show you who you are. It shows you who you might be mistaken for. All of them."

She will describe this as akin to multi-versal feedback. Jenny can already see more than most people; she avoids objects that allow others to do what she can do naturally.

Links

• Her page at Public Domain Super Heroes

HAPPY JENNY EVERYWHERE DAY!

Tales of Jackson, IL: Winnie the Witch

I love public domain and open source characters.

More specifically, I love characters that creators can pick up, reinterpret, remix, and send off in completely new directions.

I have a particular fondness for the kind of character a creator can take in hand, put my own spin on, and send off down an entirely different path. I put that to use with Jenny Everywhere, or "The Shifter" as she is sometimes called. An open-source creation from 2002, Jenny was made to be shared and remade on the premise that she is present in all realities and at liberty to move among them. The concept is ideal for one who wants to cross genres and continuities. And I love her.

When I was working my way through the Doctor Who role-playing games, I made good use of her. In a universe predicated on time travel and the odd encounter, she is hard to beat. She allowed me to step from one iteration of the Doctor’s world to the next without having to fret over whether continuity would hold up. There is a certain freedom in it; one is not so much replacing what was there as having a dialogue with it.

And that is what leads me to another public domain character.

In Search Of...Winnie the Witch

Winnie the Witch was one of Charlton Comics’ horror hosts.

Her claim to fame was Ghost Manor and Ghostly Haunts; under that banner, she hosted from its debut in issue #20 in 1971 all the way to 1978. In much the same vein as the Crypt Keeper or The Old Witch, or the sort of thing you would see on television later on, Winnie was the framing device for the anthology. She put a face and a personality to the proceedings by introducing the stories and putting in her two cents.

But there was an early-1970s edge to Winnie that set her apart. Forget the old crone at the cauldron; she was young, hip and blue-skinned, with a fashionable "mod" look about her. One could imagine this cool witch straying into the wrong comic from some psychedelic club in Soho or New York. She was the unmistakable presence of Ghostly Haunts and made appearances in other Charlton horror fare as well.

It put me to thinking: what ever became of her? Being who I am, I had to ask what Winnie the Witch was up to in 1986.

The answer is obvious. You will find her on television.

Winnie’s House of Horrors

In my Jackson, Illinois continuity, Winnie is now the host of a late-night horror movie show broadcast from UHF Channel 47 in Alton, Illinois. You can't always get it in very clear, the station is at the far range of what UHF can do, but it is there and some nights it comes in clear as...well UHF in the mid 80s.

Every Saturday night:

WINNIE’S HOUSE OF HORRORS

Then there are the films the network affiliates consider beneath them, or that are simply too old for anyone else to have an interest in. Some were picked up in a peculiar package deal; one has to wonder if Channel 47 was forced to put on The Giant Claw just to be allowed three titles with any name recognition. You will find Mexican vampire fare and Italian horror that has been edited until the story is even more of a mystery. Old AIP stock, creature features, public domain prints that appear to have been put through a Buick’s undercarriage. And now and again, something of genuine quality that the station folk doesn’t seem to appreciate having on their hands.

Winnie is the one who puts them on.

"UHF Channel 47 from Alton, Illinois! Home of the Piasa Bird!" she will say.

And as sure as can be, someone in the control room will cue up that old Filmation pterodactyl screech. Every time. Without fail. It is a sound Winnie loathes, so naturally the crew makes it a habit.

WINNIE: "We are broadcasting live from beautiful Alton, IL, home of the Piasa Bird..."

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

She gives the sound booth a slow look. "Charlie, I swear to God."

There is no Charlie in the sound booth. There has never been a Charlie. But when things go awry, her thoughts head there first. Because Charlie is her husband. And according to Winnie, Charlie is responsible for most of the suffering in the known universe. Well. In her universe at least.

Samantha Stephens Meets Elvira

The original Winnie was young and mod in her day. But as of 1986, my Winnie is well into her 40s. She remains attractive and has no qualms about letting you know it. Yet the old gimmick is gone; she is not "the sexy young witch" any longer. She is a mom witch now. A hot mom witch, but you get the idea.

Put it this way: imagine Samantha Stephens after two decades of matrimony, three children, PTA obligations and grocery bills have left her with zero tolerance for mortal foolishness. Then mix in some Elvira. You get Winnie. The big hair, the mod dresses that only look a little dated, cat-eye glasses and a pentagram on her throat, all with her makeup in order. There is an air to her of a woman who could call on Satan if she had the time, but there is a parent-teacher conference to attend at 8:15 am tomorrow and she knows Charlie will be late.

Her whole schtick on television is that suburban family life is more terrifying than any supernatural horror. A film will show a demon emerging from a pentagram, and Winnie will address the camera. "Demons? I have three kids. Demons would be a vacation." And we are off to commercial.

Or take a picture of some parasitic monstrosity tearing its way out of a host.

"I have felt something like that," she will say. "This thing inside me, clawing and kicking to make its exit."

She lets the silence hang for a moment.

"Was pregnant again, as it turned out."

Turns to Camera 2. "Gee, thanks, Charlie."

The viewers are fond of Charlie. They have never laid eyes on him, and everyone wonders if he is real. From what Winnie tells us, Charlie is the one who can’t fix the garage door, who considers Hamburger Helper to be cooking, or who invited his mother over "for a few days" and once put the station van through a cemetery gate. He is responsible for buying the wrong dishwasher and for forgetting their anniversary every year. 

"Our next offering has an ancient curse set loose by a fool who pays no heed to warnings," she might say.

She will look right at you.

"In other words, Charlie."

Other Horror Hostesses

Winnie also has an ongoing rivalry with Countess von Bludd, the glamorous vampire hostess from a competing station in St. Louis. Introduced in Scary Tales #12, the Countess dresses entirely in red and presents herself as a far more elegant and sophisticated creature of the night. Winnie remains unimpressed. 

"Over in St. Louis, Countess von Bludd is showing yet another vampire picture tonight. All red dress, red curtains, red lipstick. Apparently, subtlety died before she did."

The rivalry is mostly theatrical, the sort of manufactured feud local stations would encourage for publicity. Winnie calls her "that overdressed mosquito from St. Louis," while the Countess refers to Winnie as "the housewife of horrors." Privately, they may even like each other, but neither woman would ever spoil the act by admitting it.

She also talks about the time she won the "Miss Fortune" beauty contest against another Horror Hostess, Arachne Coffin. But she fails to mention that she lost the title to Arachne the next year. Her rivalry with Arachne seems to be one more of mutual respect. 

The Joke Is Winnie Is Really a Witch

Here is the important bit: Winnie is, in fact, a witch. The viewers take it as part of the performance, and why wouldn’t they? It is a horror-host show after all. She has her cauldron, her candles, the skulls on display. Now and then she puts on a "spell" for laughs. What none of them are aware of is that some of these have a way of working.

Take the protection charm she put on before Black Sunday; that was no act. Or when she made the point about not heeding a dead relative’s voice from outside the house; one can be sure of that. As for the salt she put down at the studio door in the course of a commercial break, there was method to it.

The station crew are not entirely certain what to make of it, but they have been witness to odd occurrences in Winnie’s vicinity. They do not inquire. This is local TV, and people have their own troubles to contend with.

It's also not entirely clear when Winnie became a witch. Was it when she was in her 20s or before? Did she become a witch later after pretending to be one? But she isn’t telling anyone anything, and she uses her magic on a UHF Public Access show. 

It is probably Charlie’s fault.

The Soccer Mom of Darkness

I have a soft spot for another aspect of Winnie’s act. She acts like a mother, and in truth she is one, with three children to her name. 

There is another part of Winnie’s gimmick that I really like. She looks like somebody’s mom. You can tell by the way she drives; it is an aggressively normal vehicle, most likely a Chevy station wagon. One might even find a "MY OTHER CAR IS A BROOM" sticker on the back of it, though Winnie would be loath to admit Charlie put it there.

She is the type to go to the grocery store or a school function and have something to say about the school board. She has no doubt made brownies for the bake sale. And yet she does all of this while giving the impression she could be putting on a Black Sabbath show when the day is done.

Put it to the people who were watching Channel 47 as kids, and they will be talking about her in some documentary down the line. The conversation goes like this:

"Winnie the Witch? Yeah. She was the original MILF."

"Oh, you can say that again."

Only it doesn’t do her justice. They will recall the hair and the cleavage, the barbs at Charlie’s expense and that ridiculous Piasa Bird noise. 

What gets left out is that Winnie knew things. She is clearly well-versed in the occult.

The Jackson Connection

Naturally, Stephanie, Faye, and Larina watch her.

Stephanie, Faye, and Larina watching Winnie the Witch

It is late Saturday night, and they are together at a sleepover with some popcorn and Diet Pepsi while a fourteen-inch set in Larina’s bedroom puts on a particularly bad horror film.

Stephanie is taken with Winnie from the start. She has an appreciation for performance and can tell when Winnie is in command of a room by dictating how one is to view her before you have made up your own mind. And she is loath to admit it, but she loves the movies too.

Faye is there for the movies; the more awful the better. And she finds Winnie to be hilarious, and kinda hot.

Larina is not so sure. She has been listening to the occult talk, and most of it is just television drivel. Until Winnie says something. Very specific. Obscure. The sort of thing Larina has come across in only one book.

She sits up a little.

LARINA: "Wait."
FAYE: (without looking up from her popcorn) "What?"
LARINA: "What she said."
STEPHANIE: "And?"
LARINA: "It was right."
FAYE: "Good for her," turning back to the screen.
LARINA: "No, you don’t understand. She pronounced it right."
STEPHANIE: "Maybe she got it out of Buckland’s book."
LARINA: (quieter) "That’s not in Buckland’s book." 

Larina is studying Winnie now, and things keep catching her attention. Perhaps it is a sighting, or something Winnie put on air that had a ring to it in Jackson. Or other cases, say from Carbon Vale, Larina’s home before 1985.

In that moment, Larina stops to consider if Winnie the Witch is any kind of charade. She begins to wonder what it is Winnie knows. She has been to Jackson once and, unlike most who go there, she knew when to make her exit.

That is the way I see it. Not some superhero or sage of the occult, nor a comic relief. Winnie is a witch of twenty years' standing who has seen enough supernatural oddities to know the first rule of the trade: get in the station wagon and head home. Before Charlie sees you have taken the good car.

Over in Alton...

"This is Winnie the Witch on Channel 47 in Alton, Illinois..."

She lets out a sigh. "Home of the Piasa Bird."

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Winnie shuts her eyes.

"I hate this job."

She absolutely does not.

Using Winnie in Your Game

Winnie can be used as background or as comic relief, and that is perfectly fine. She can be on in the background just doing her show, complaining about Charlie.

"Charlie said he fixed the antenna. Charlie also said he could install a ceiling fan. We spent Thanksgiving in the emergency room."

But I intend to use her for more than that. She can be the source of some very subtle clues. Being a witch, she has her way of knowing things. For one, she is aware there are other witches with eyes on her.

I am not talking about her halting the film to look down the lens and lay out the adventure for the player characters. The clues need to come across as part of the act. A warning couched in a joke, perhaps, or a piece of folklore in the intro, or an odd shift in tone when she brings up a certain town or local legend. There might be a warding gesture while the camera is still rolling.

It is the difference between what the casual viewer and a witch will take from it. 

"Tonight’s creature has a talent for mimicking the ones you hold dear. So boys and girls, if your late grandmother should ring you from the cornfield, do let her leave a message."

The room will laugh. Larina will make a note of it.

Then there is the matter of Jackson. In my games, Winnie knows it. Not in the sense of "oh, that town 70 miles up 67?" but rather, "You are living on Mauvaisterre land? Why in the hell would you put yourself in that town?"

One thing I would like to avoid, though, is having her show up in Jackson. Not because I don’t want her there; I think she would be a lot of fun, but I want to avoid a couple of things. First, I want to avoid the whole "Special Guest Star" syndrome. Sure, it can be fun under the right circumstances, but not too much. Secondly, and this is more specific to this situation is I want to avoid making her into a "Peter Vincent" from Fright Night. 

I mean. Obviously, Elvira is a huge influence on…well…a lot of things, but it is Peter Vincent who is on my mind a lot for this one. Sorry, Winnie, don’t mean to compare you to Roddy McDowall.

Winnie will provide the clues, sometimes looking straight at the camera and saying things like "No. The other road." No one knows what she is talking about, but the PCs might.

Used this way, Winnie becomes a kind of supernatural numbers station. The messages are there. The players simply have to realize these are messages AND, more importantly, the messages are meant for them.

Winnie also has a feature on her show, "Winnie's Witch Mail," where a letter is "delivered" to her by a rubber bat on strings she calls "Vlad." She reads viewer mail. No one is sure if the letters are real or not, but if the Characters write her a letter, she will answer it on air in a couple of weeks.

Stephanie, Larina, and Faye watch it in complete shock.

FAYE: What the fuck?
LARINA (sipping her Diet Pepsi): See. Told ya.

Links

• The Levitation of Winnie the Witch
• SLAY Monsterbot of the Deep! Bold Fashion Choices--Winnie The Witch!!
• Ghostly Haunts
• Rip Jagger's Dojo: The 13 Faces Of Winnie!
• Marvel Mysteries and Comics Minutiae: Ditko at Charlton Part 2: 1972-1974
• Facebook
• Public Domain HEROES
• Charlton Neo Comics
• International Catalog of Superheroes
• Comicvine: Winnie the Witch
• Winnie the Witch at the Grand Comics Database
• Ghost Manor (1968 series)
• Ghostly Haunts (1971 series)
• MyComicShop: Ghostly Haunts Issue Index
• Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars

Mirror Mondays: The Witches of 1986. The Satanic Panic

The Satanic Panic and the Secret Appeal of Forbidden Books

I am currently reading Manly Wade Wellman for my Witches of Appendix N. He has a lot of occult investigators and talks a lot about dangerous occult texts. There is a strange magic to being told a book is dangerous.

Not real magic. Not the kind the pamphlets warned us about. Not the sort of thing that appears when you mispronounce something in Latin while standing in a chalk circle at midnight. I mean the older, more human kind of magic. The kind that happens when an adult lowers their voice, points at a book, and says, "You should not be reading that."

For a certain sort of kid, that is not a warning.

It is an invitation.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately while working on my Advanced Witches & Warlocks and Jackson, IL projects. I have also been going back through some old Satanic Panic videos, both vintage and retrospective. Some are from the era itself. Some are modern looks back. One or two are modern warnings that feel like they could have been broadcast in 1986 with very little editing.

I am not here to dunk on them. Well. Not entirely.

Some of this material is ridiculous. Some of it is unintentionally hilarious. Some of it is sad. Some of it is built out of real grief aimed in the wrong direction. Some of it comes from people who were clearly frightened by a world changing faster than they knew how to handle.

But all of it circles the same idea 

The fear was not really just about Dungeons & Dragons. It was not just about heavy metal. It was not just about horror movies, Smurfs, He-Man, E.T., or some plastic wizard in the toybox. The fear was about children having access to an imaginative life that adults could not completely supervise.

And that, I think, is where the forbidden book gets its power.

I have written about the Satanic Panic before. Back in 2024, I said I was fascinated by it because I had lived through it and, as someone who was not religious, the whole panic was confusing to me. I also admitted something else that still feels true: my own teenage reaction to all of it absolutely influenced my early D&D games. Lots of undead. Lots of demons. And, yes, lots of witches. Immature? Sure. I was a teenager. That was practically my job. But it was also fruitful. Some of that old material has never really left me. It just waited for better books to live in.

The Panic in the Toybox

One of the great artifacts of the era is Turmoil in the Toybox. If you have never seen it, it is one of those videos that feels like it was assembled in a church basement, a public access studio, and a fever dream all at the same time. Gary Greenwald and Phil Phillips seem convinced that the devil is hiding in every toybox, or at least making a pretty serious attempt to franchise there.

• The Smurfs? Suspicious.
• Masters of the Universe? Dangerous.
• E.T.? Worth a second look.
• Dungeons & Dragons? Obviously trouble.

The whole thing is amazing because it does not merely worry about D&D. It worries about the entire imaginative ecosystem of childhood. Toys, cartoons, commercials, fantasy symbols, magic words, Saturday morning television, action figures, and role-playing games all become part of one invisible machinery. The toybox is no longer a toybox. It is a grimoire with plastic hinges.

That sounds like a joke, but that really is how the panic worked.

The D&D section is especially perfect. The game pieces, they tell us, include witches, wizards, necromancers, clerics, evil magic-users, and all the usual suspects. Good versus evil becomes white witchcraft versus black witchcraft. Someone even claims that when game pieces are burned, screams come out of the fire because spiritual forces have inhabited them.

Now, look. That is nonsense. But it is also myth-making.

The panic did not merely misunderstand Dungeons & Dragons. It mythologized it.

That is the funny thing. The adults who wanted to make the game smaller made it larger. They turned rulebooks into occult manuals, dice into ritual objects, miniatures into idols, character sheets into dangerous documents, and the Dungeon Master into some sort of suburban necromancer with graph paper.

For the average kid, D&D was a game. A weird, wonderful, sometimes confusing game with too many charts and not enough hit points at 1st level.

But after the panic got hold of it? 

Now it was forbidden. And forbidden things glow.

The Book They Told You Not to Read

The Satanic Panic did not create the fire of D&D’s mystique, but it poured gasoline on it.

The books already looked strange. The Monster Manual was full of demons, devils, dragons, undead, and things with names that sounded like they had crawled out of some medieval marginalia. The Dungeon Masters Guide felt like an occult textbook even when it was mostly explaining initiative, treasure tables, magic item creation, and why you should never let the players get away with too much.

Then the grown-ups started saying these books were dangerous.

Well. That certainly did not make them less interesting.

In the 1980s, D&D books became contraband grimoires in the popular imagination. They were passed from hand to hand, argued over in churches, hidden from certain relatives, discussed on television, condemned in pamphlets, and defended at kitchen tables by kids who were absolutely certain that none of the adults understood what was actually happening.

Most of the time, the kids were right.

The game was not teaching us how to summon demons. It was teaching us how to imagine consequences. It was teaching us how to map darkness. It was teaching us that monsters had names, rules, weaknesses, treasure types, and armor classes.

That is powerful. Not Satanic. Not corrupting. Powerful. And power is always frightening to someone.

Or as my mom once so eloquently said about D&D, "This is nothing but Mythology and math!"

The Wrong Demons

One of the more painful parts of looking back at the Satanic Panic is realizing how often adults named the wrong demons.

There were real kids in pain. There were real families struggling. There were real cases of depression, isolation, abuse, grief, mental illness, and fear. But instead of asking harder questions, too many people blamed the game, the records, the horror movies, the toys, the novels, the black t-shirts, the dice.

That is the actual horror.

Not that adults believed in demons. I write about demons all the time. My newest book, Codex Qliphothica, is full of things no sensible person would want crawling out of the wrong side of creation.

The horror is that they named the wrong demons.

That is something I touched on in my 2022 A-to-Z post. In the real world, there is no worldwide Satanic conspiracy. There are no secret armies of Satanists trafficking children through every daycare, pizza parlor, and game store. But in a horror game, there can be demons, devils, evil spirits, and worse. The trick is not to make the panic true. The trick is to understand that people are often looking in the wrong direction. Sometimes the evil is not a cult at all. Sometimes it is perfectly ordinary people who use fear to hurt the "undesirables" in their own community.

That idea matters a lot to me, especially for Jackson, IL. In a town like Jackson in 1986, it is easy to imagine a parent seeing a TV preacher or a warning video and suddenly looking at everything in their kid’s room differently. The D&D hardback. The heavy metal cassette. The horror VHS tape. The plastic skeleton warrior. The fantasy paperback. The notebook is full of strange names. The girl at school who wears a triple-goddess necklace and knows too much.

Most of the time, the adults are wrong.

But this is Jackson. Sometimes they are wrong in the direction of something true.

That is the sweet spot for horror.

In the real world, the panic was destructive because it mistook imagination for corruption. In fiction, though, we can ask the more interesting question: what if the panic was wrong about the cause, but not wrong that something was there?

• What if the book was just a game book, but the thing watching from the closet was real?
• What if the record was harmless, but the voice on the blank tape was not?
• What if the toy was just plastic, but the child was right when she said it moved after midnight?

That is not the Satanic Panic being correct. That is horror using the emotional vocabulary of the panic and aiming it at better targets.

Click to get your own!

 My Life With the Satanic Cult

This is where it stops being only media history for me.

I grew up in a small town in Central Illinois. In 2024 I wrote about a moment from around 1985 or 1986 when someone supposedly found a "satanic altar" in a cornfield south of my high school. I remember the panic ripping through the school. I remember being fascinated and horrified by it. Fascinated by how fast everyone reacted. Horrified by how quickly it changed people. The next day, people wore homemade "Satan Busters" armbands featuring an inverted cross within a red buster circle.

That is the kind of detail no amount of research can invent better than memory.

I was already a D&D kid. I was already interested in witches, monsters, demons, horror, occult books, and the kinds of things polite adults thought you should probably not be reading. I was also an atheist in a place where the average person on the street did not know, or care to know, the difference between atheist, Satanist, witch, gamer, metalhead, or just "weird kid."

The assistant principal, who was a decent guy, told me and some of my gamer friends that we should keep our D&D books at home until all this stupid shit blew over. He was probably right. I still hated it.

I hated the idea that something I wanted to read had to be hidden because a mob of scared idiots had decided books were dangerous.

That feeling has never really left me.

And yes, as I wrote before, my love of psychology was probably strengthened then. So was my love of witches. No one was trying to burn me, not literally, but they were trying to burn the things they feared. And there were book burnings in town. Real ones. People on the conservative religious side burning D&D books and other things they did not understand.

That matters.

Because once you have seen people burn books, you never look at forbidden books the same way again.

Heavy Metal, Horror Movies, and the Forbidden Shelf

By 1986, the forbidden book was not alone. It had a lot of company.

There was the forbidden record album, especially if someone claimed the lyrics meant something different when played backward. There was the forbidden horror movie from the video store, the one with a cover more dangerous than the movie itself. There were forbidden toys, forbidden cartoons, forbidden symbols, forbidden bands, forbidden fantasy novels, forbidden magazines, forbidden games.

The whole shelf was glowing in an evil Satanic light.

That is why a movie like Trick or Treat is such a perfect artifact of 1986. It takes the heavy metal panic seriously enough to turn it into a horror plot. A dead rock star comes back through a record. The music really is dangerous. The adults' warning about Satanic rock is, inside the logic of the movie, kind of right.

That is hilarious. It is also revealing, and wonderful for my games.

Horror loves taking the thing adults are panicking about and saying, "Fine. But what if it really was haunted?"

• What if the record really does speak something backward?
• What if the toy really does know your name?
• What if the book really does open a door?
• What if the game really does teach you something you were not supposed to know?

That is not how the real world works. But it is absolutely how good horror works. It is very much how Jackson works.

The Satanic Panic Never Really Went Away

The funny thing is, the Satanic Panic did not completely vanish. It changed clothes.

In 2022 I wrote that if you think this "corn-filled nugget" was left behind in the 1980s, I had some news. The panic’s old shape involved Satanists, daycare centers, trafficking, cannibalism, and ritual abuse. Later versions involved Pizzagate, QAnon, and other conspiracy nonsense that kept recycling the same fears in new packaging. 

That is why a modern Christian response to D&D can still feel so oddly familiar. The video is new. The anxieties are old. Role-playing as spiritual danger. Spellcasting as a gateway. Tiamat as proof of pagan contamination. D&D books as corrupting objects. Christian parents being warned to keep the game out of the house. It is all there, just with better lighting, HD resolution, and modern YouTube pacing.

I do not say that to mock people’s faith. I know plenty of Christians who play D&D, write horror, love fantasy, and understand perfectly well where the game ends and the real world begins.

But the panic itself? That old habit of flattening every strange symbol into “Satanic”? That is still with us.

And honestly, from a horror writer’s point of view, it is hard not to be fascinated by it.

The Witch Was Always There

Here is the part that matters most for Advanced Witches & Warlocks.

The panic kept pointing at the Witch.

Even when people were talking about D&D generally, the real charge was around magic. Spellcasting. Divination. Necromancy. Enchantment. Demons. Spirits. Symbols. Curses. The old gods. Forbidden knowledge. Books that teach you things.

Again and again, the panic caught sight of the Witch's shadow and recoiled.

I want to do the opposite. I want to look directly at her and say, "Yes. You belong here."

The Witch was always part of fantasy gaming, even when the game did not quite know what to do with her. She was there as the evil enchantress, the village wise woman, the hag in the woods, the priestess of the old gods, the herbalist, the oracle, the charm-worker, the necromancer, the woman everyone feared and visited anyway.

• She was there in the margins.
• She was there at the edge of the village.
• She was there in the spell list.
• She was there in the panic.

The mistake was reducing her to "evil spellcaster" or treating her as merely a monster. The Witch is older than that. Stranger than that. More useful than that. She is better than that.

The Witch belongs to the place where folklore, religion, fear, healing, social suspicion, forbidden knowledge, and personal power all overlap. Which is to say, she belongs in D&D perfectly.

That is what Advanced Witches & Warlocks is about. Not making the panic true, but reclaiming the imaginative territory the panic could not stop pointing at.

High School Is the Real Haunted House

The Satanic Panic also helped sharpen something else for me: the horror of being a teenager and having adults decide what your symbols mean before you get to explain them.

I came back to that in my Monsterhearts post, where I talked about Larina in 1986. High school is already horrifying. Add the Satanic Panic, a sleepy Midwestern college town, and a girl everyone already suspects is out in the woods sacrificing animals and calling up demons, and you have something that feels very close to the emotional center of Jackson, IL. The truth, of course, is smaller and stranger. Larina is more likely to be in her attic room listening to her dad’s Yes albums than leading a coven in the cornfields. But rumor has never needed truth to grow teeth.

That is the Jackson mood. I talked about this in detail last week.

The town does not need every parent to believe there is a demon in the toybox. It only needs enough of them to wonder. Enough to whisper. Enough to throw away a book, forbid a game, search a bedroom, call a pastor, or look twice at the quiet girl with the strange necklace and the too-old eyes.

And the kids? The kids know the adults are wrong. Mostly.

These Are the Books You Were Warned About

So here is my cheeky little sales pitch, and I am only half joking.

These are the books you were warned about in 1986.

Codex Qliphothica is on the way out, and it is very much a demon book. But it is not a "everything dark is Satanic" book. That was always one of the dullest parts of the panic. It flattened everything. Devils, demons, pagan gods, witches, ghosts, occult symbols, fantasy monsters, and rock music all became one big smear of "darkness."

Good horror does not flatten. Good horror names things.

The Qliphoth are not generic devils. They are not just demons with a different coat of paint. They are shells, refuse, wounds, corruptions, anti-creation, things that should not have survived the making of the world and yet did. They are what happens when the cosmos has a scar and something learns to live inside it.

That is much more interesting than "the devil is in the toybox."

Advanced Witches & Warlocks comes from the other side of the same forbidden bookshelf. It asks what old-school fantasy gaming looks like when the Witch is not a joke, not a monster, not an afterthought, and not simply a reskinned magic-user. What if she had been there properly all along? What if the game had made room for occult magic as something distinct from arcane study and divine authority?

And Jackson, IL is where all of this comes home.

Jackson is 1986 as a haunted town. It is school lockers and church warnings, mall bookstores and strange kids, rumors and records, public access panic and real shadows behind the gym. It is the place where adults blame D&D, heavy metal, horror movies, and witchcraft because those are the monsters they know how to name.

But Jackson has older monsters. Jackson has quieter monsters. Jackson has the things that were listening while everyone argued about the wrong books.

The Secret Appeal

The secret appeal of forbidden books is not that they are evil. It is that they promise the world is larger than you were told. That is the real danger.

A forbidden book says there are secret doors. It says names matter. It says monsters can be known. It says the dead might speak, the old gods might stir, the map might continue past the edge, and the strange kid might not be strange for nothing.

That is why the warnings failed. They told us the books were dangerous. We believed them; we just understood danger differently.

For some of us, danger meant possibility. It meant mystery. It meant there was something behind the ordinary world, something the adults were either too frightened or too tired to see.

That is the heart of fantasy gaming. That is the heart of occult horror. That is the heart of every witch story worth telling.

In 1986, that promise might have been sitting on a bookshelf with a dragon on the cover.

• Or in a toybox.
• Or in a record sleeve.
• Or on a VHS tape from the back room of the video store.
• Or in the hands of the quiet girl at school who knew more than she should.

And if someone told you not to open it?

Well...You were probably going to open it.

Mirror Shard: The Jackson Satanic Panic

I feel like I have talked about this one a lot already. Partially in posts here and all weekend at EGG Con. In "Am I Evil," the Satanic Panic comes to Jackson, but not in the way the town's folk expect. It is in the form of Moria Elizabeth Zachary. She looks like a nice girl. She wears fuzzy sweaters. She is polite. She has an ugly dog she holds. And she is utterly evil.

Darren Vale acts evil, but he is really sort of a joke. Sylvia Velasco is evil, but not the way everyone thinks she is. People even think Faye Thorne is evil, she isn't, but her family is. 

As my co-creator of NIGHT SHIFT, Jason Vey, commented this past weekend, the Satanic Panic in Jackson takes on new dimensions. 

And of course I have my own real-world history from the real-world Jacksonville. Sure, it is not as dramatic as some other tales of the Satanic Panic, but it has the advantage of being mine. 

There is just too much material here to use. Really...there is too much material NOT to do this. 

Links

Videos

• D&D is Satanic, from the classic "Turmoil in the Toybox." A must-watch!
• Trick or Treat (1986) The Satanic Panic of the 1980s (Retrospective)
• The Satanic Panic: A Brief History. A great retrospective and overview of the Satanic Panic and D&D's place in it.
• KSTP Twin Cities Live August 1986: Satan is in your Child’s Bedroom. From the day, the Satanic Panic sealed in amber for us to enjoy.
• Christian Concerns about Dungeons & Dragons, newer, but it shows that 40 years later, people still keep making the same nonsensical mistakes.

My Posts

• Satanic Panic!
• A to Z of Witches. O is for Occult Panic and Obeah. Links to Turmoil in the Toybox
• AtoZChallenge2022: S is for Satanic Panic
• AtoZChallenge2024: S is for Satanic Panic